


Supernova

by southspinner



Series: Oblivion [3]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Cancer, I'm so sorry, M/M, i am emotionally compromised, the fault in our stars au, the official end of the Oblivion series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-27
Updated: 2014-08-27
Packaged: 2018-02-15 01:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2210508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/southspinner/pseuds/southspinner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes when a supernova fades away, it leaves a black hole in its wake, massive and destructive as it sucks in everything around it. But scientists have a theory that black holes can lead to new parts of the universe if not new universes entirely. We must collapse before we can move on to something new.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Supernova

June.

Doctor’s appointments. PET scans. So many MRIs that I feel like there’s a thunderstorm in my head for weeks.

Different results.

Not indefinitely terminal anymore. New growth. My miracle is over.

Mom and Dad don’t cry because they’ve known this day was coming for years. I don’t cry because I’m too tired to.

My oncologist says something about a last-ditch shot at chemo, and I tell her to forget about it before she’s even done talking. I’m not buying a few more weeks at the price of being shaky and sick and a shadow of myself. I’ve seen what that weight looks like on someone’s shoulders, read about exactly how it erodes the soul. I don’t want it.

I ask her for a timeframe.

“Seven months.”

I hear it in someone else’s voice and have to leave the room so no one sees me collapse.

* * *

July.

I’ve always liked shopping for clothes, but standing in a brand-new suit had never felt so awful.

“You look good, bud,” Dad says, and he almost doesn’t sound like he’s choking on the words.

I swallow hard and nod.

Jean needed the irony of being put underground in a thousand-dollar Brooks Brothers suit. I can make do with a cheaper model from Men’s Warehouse.

“So, what’s the occasion?” the guy taking my measurements asks.

I’m shopping for something to wear at my own funeral.

“A friend of mine’s getting married next month.”

Grit your teeth, Marco. Smile. If he could do it, so can you.

* * *

August.

Levi and Hange get married outside in a park in upstate New York, and it would be lovely, probably is lovely for anyone who isn’t sitting in the August heat with a long-sleeved suit and an oxygen tank. My whole body hurts when Amelie runs up in her flower girl dress and throws her arms around me, already taller than I remembered. I laugh and hug her back. If he could do it, so can you.

“You’re looking good, Marco,” Levi notes at the reception over the top of a champagne glass, too deadpanned for me to tell if he’s being sarcastic or not.

Finally, someone who doesn’t require a plastic smile. “Cut the bullshit. I’m dying.”

“Relatively common knowledge. I believe we all heard that on Ellen a few months ago.”

“Yeah, thanks for that,” I grumble bitterly, grabbing the nearest alcoholic something from a passing waiter. No one’s going to say anything to me about drinking. Cancer perk. “I always wanted my life and love and loss to be in the works for a movie deal.”

“You know I won’t let them make the fucking movie, and I’ve already explained that I was doing my best to carry out Jean’s wishes-”

“I don’t want to talk about Jean.” His name burns in my throat just like the whiskey-whatever that I gulp to chase it down. “And for the record, I’m _actually_ dying. My miracle drug stopped working. Five months.”

The me that would have felt bad for the way the color drains from Levi’s face was buried on a snowy day in January. He blinks a few times and finishes his drink. “Please tell me this isn’t you asking me to edit your memoir.”

“I don’t feel the compulsive need to immortalize myself. Don’t worry. After the past few months, I’m ready for the world to forget me,” I tell him, sounding more weary than I thought possible. “Congrats on _Equations_ , by the way. I read the excerpt on your PR blog. Try to get it out soon, yeah?”

Levi opens his mouth to say something, but in the middle of his train of thought Hange comes stumbling over, merrily drunk and barefoot, designer heels looped over her fingers. “Leeeeeevi. _Liebling_ , they’re saying something about a garter, are we supposed to - oh, hello, Marco!”

“Hi, Hange. Congratulations.” It’s the first real smile I’ve managed in weeks, because as much of an asshole as I am for dropping my impending demise on Levi on his wedding day, he still looks almost disbelieving when he looks at her, like he can’t fathom the universe giving him something instead of taking it away. I had my great cosmic love. Today, they get to have theirs. I feel like I’m staining their happiness with my jealousy.

I think about Jean in a tux standing at the end of a long aisle with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. I can’t breathe. What else is new?

“Try to see if you can get that cute Dylan Whatshisface from _Teen Wolf_ to play me in the movie, okay?” I mutter to Levi before walking off to find somewhere to sit down, leaving him to his hard-won happy ending. My tank and my resolve to stay functional are running low.

I give Amelie the dance she begs for with wide eyes despite my lungs screaming at me by the time it’s over, wonder how it felt to walk all over Paris on a leg racked with bone cancer. I tried to tell Jean what feels like a lifetime ago that I wasn’t a good person. His problem was that by virtue of logic, he never knew me without him.

He made me better. What I am now would horrify him. That thought keeps me awake for two days straight.

* * *

September.

Eren goes off to college. Everyone is proud of him, including me. He stands on my porch while his mom honks her horn and yells something about being late, hugs me so tightly that I can see bruises forming on my ricepaper skin by the time he pulls away. “I’ll see you at Thanksgiving. Skype me tonight, okay?”

“Will do.”

The Skype call doesn’t happen because that night, I end up in the ER with fluid in my lungs so thick that my fingernails turn blue from lack of oxygen. Two days of scratchy hospital sheets and generic wallpaper that’s too familiar. Eren tries to tell me that he’s coming home. I tell him that if I see him in Trost before Thanksgiving dinner on my account I’ll shove my foot up his ass, cancer or no. He laughs. I do too.

It’s a great feeling until I cough so hard that the tissues in my hand come back bloody.

* * *

October.

Sasha and Connie roll in from their fall tour down the west coast, crashing through the front door at three in the morning with stories tucked into the linings of their pockets and an actual crate of moonshine in the back of the bus. The three of us sit in the living room and get far more drunk than we should, talking about their new record deal and if we can get Mom to make us popcorn balls tomorrow. Connie fills up an extra glass and sits it on the table. We all know who it’s for.

“So are you guys gonna hit the studio soon?” I ask Sasha, trying not to think about how desolate that stupid Solo cup full of homemade moonshine is, try to tell myself that metaphorical significance is meaningless to the dead as I pull a cigarette out of my pocket and place it on the coffee table next to the untouched drink. The same carton of Marlboro Reds I stole from the Kirschteins’ basement in June. I haven’t smoked one since that night, but sometimes I like to sit and run my fingertips over the rows of neat little cylinders, remind myself that I could if I wanted to.

It’s an exercise in power.

Sasha shakes her head, looks from me to Connie and back to me with a nervous little smile. “Nah. We figured we’d take some downtime. We’re going to stick around here for a few months.”

Stick around until the funeral’s over with, have some time to grieve, and then write an amazing record about it. I could almost laugh at the fact that she’s even bothering to sugar-coat it for me when I’m the one who’s going to be dead. Like she can protect me from my own end the way she used to protect me from neighborhood bullies or traffic on the walk home from school.

Sorry, sis. You can’t hold my hand across this street.

The irony in all of this is so good, and there’s no one to share it with. I sigh and let my head fall back against the wall, perching an unlit cigarette between my lips and tasting stale bitterness on the paper.

It’s as close to kissing him as I can get.

* * *

November.

Doctor’s appointments. ER. Hospital.

No amount of oxygen intake does anything anymore. A month has taken me from my portable tank and relative ease of mobility to a hospital bed and more machinery than I can keep track of. Weeks pass. Everything goes fuzzy. Sasha reads me the manuscript of _Equations_ that Levi sends in the mail, and while I come to understand him a little better for it, I’d be a liar to say that I tune in for the whole story. The world goes formless for long stretches of time, a cocktail of morphine and filtered air sending me spinning, spots of soft red dancing in front of my eyes. I have conversations that I’m not even conscious for.

Lucidity is a rare and precious thing, something I usually save for Mom. Those five-minute snatches of me being able to sit up and talk to her intelligently mean more than she’s willing to admit, but I can feel it in the press of her slender palm against my cheek, try not to notice how she looks so much older than she did a year ago.

I come up from the haze one day right before Thanksgiving to an empty room, to Sasha out in the hallway muttering into her phone. “No. No, he’s not in any shape to talk right now, Eren, I’m sorry. I… yeah, I know that. No, listen to me, you’re not here, you don’t get it. Marco has better things to do with the oxygen he’s got than talk to any of us. He’s been really out of it lately, okay? Out of it to the point that he’s been asking for Jean.”

God, have I really? My condition must be starting to affect my brain if I’m doing that in my mumbled, half-awake mantras. Jean is dead, and I’ve known that with a horrible, sinking finality since last December. Jean is dead and soon I will be too, but I’ve never been stupid enough to think that the correlation of us biting the dust will mean any storybook reunion in some great beyond. Jean’s gone, what’s left of him is in a box under six feet of cold dirt, and I’m headed for the same fate in however many days or weeks or months. He was always the one who thought that capital-S-Something happened to the human soul. I envied him for being able to hope like that.

I use my remaining lucidity to mark out a calendar in my head. I met him in April. He died in December. Nine months. It’s been eleven months since he died.

Jean Kirschtein has been out of my life longer than he was in it, and it’s that realization that makes me curl up in my uncomfortable bed with a raspy wail and jab at my morphine-on-demand button until everything goes soft and fuzzy again, until everything is bearable.

Until I retreat into a world where I can apparently trick myself into thinking that he’s still here.

* * *

December.

The infamous Last Hospital Stay. Sterile white walls. Family I haven’t seen since I was a little kid crawling out of the woodwork. God, Mom looks like she’s aged a decade.

Eren comes home from college in a week. I tell myself that if I’m worth anything, I can at least make it that long. Levi rolls in from O’Hare in a rented car, looking as uncomfortable around other people as ever.

“Christ, tell me you didn’t bring Amelie,” I rasp out, looking at the empty doorway behind him.

“I’m an abominable asshole; not stupid. Two distinctly different things,” he says flatly, pulling up a chair to the side of my bed and grimacing at our surroundings. “How do you fucking stand it in here?”

“A lot of really good drugs.”

Levi snorts and pulls a flask out of the inside pocket of his jacket, raising it in an unspoken toast to an unspoken person and taking a long pull from it. “A good strategy. Don’t tell the wife, by the way. I really am getting better, I just… need a little something extra to deal with hospitals. Haven’t set foot in one since Petra, and… yeah.”

“Understandable.” No it’s not. I have no idea how to understand it. I wasn’t at the hospital when Jean died. He didn’t want me there. Chapter twenty, paragraph seventy-two. _Don’t call Marco. God, Mom, p-please don’t call Marco._ He was dead and cold and on his way to the funeral home before I even knew that he’d taken a turn for the worse. Jean always was bad with making exits. He tried to sneak out of his house to go to Paris. He succeeded in sneaking out of the world and leaving me none the wiser for hours. We don’t know that a star dies until after it’s already gone.

We both sit in silence for a while, Levi with his flask and me with my IV drip, holding onto life and sanity with chemical tethers. I sort of wish that I was out of it for this part. Despite how rocky as our friendship(?) has been, I have no desire to lie here and watch Levi say his goodbyes.

“You might as well just get it over with,” I sigh, a spike of pain in my lungs as I lie back against the pillows. “And while you’re at it, reach in the nightstand and get me a cigarette.”

“The mark Jean Kirschtein left on this world wasn’t a book, it was turning his boyfriend into a pretentious little shit just like he was,” he grumbles.

“Don’t speak ill of the dead.”

“Why not?”

I don’t have an answer for that, and Levi seems to revel in my silence, smirking as he hands me a Marlboro Red that hangs from the corner of my mouth as he takes a deep breath of sanitizer-scented hospital air and looks up at me.

“The day Erwin handed you that copy of _The Infinity Vault_ after support group, he called me. And he said ‘Levi, I don’t want you to be mad, but I gave the book to one of my kids, because I look at him and I see you.’ And naturally, like the fucked-up mess of equal parts narcissism and self-loathing that I am, I waved it off. Because no one could be me.” I can tell that he’s written all of this out in advance, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at that, hands knotting up in the cotton blankets stretched over my lap. “And after I met you and figured out who you were, I thought that it was an even bigger load of bullshit. It took fixing myself up a little and a lot of soul-searching and all that dumb shit before it finally clicked and I realized it. Two really smart kids who see the world for the massive shit-hole that it is. One chooses to retreat into himself and fall in love with his own misery. The other chooses to search for what little bit of beauty he can find and fall in love with it when he does. You’re the me who made all the right choices, and seeing that made me consider making the right choices. So basically everything I have right now I owe to you, and I just… yeah. In short, it’s been a privilege, Marco. And whether or not you intended to, you’ve made a mark on the world."

“Talking about your journey of self-discovery and your awesome new life to a kid dying of cancer,” I snort, smirking around the cigarette. “You _are_ a narcissistic bastard.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Levi genuinely laugh.

* * *

A few more days. The world goes fuzzy again, pain dulled by the meds but still present, growing stronger.

Pain.

Pain.

_Pain._

Blaring alarms and a bustle of people. “I can’t breathe. Mom, I can’t _breathe_.”

I hear it in someone else’s voice, and breathing gets all the harder.

Moving ceiling tiles. The cool plastic of an oxygen mask. A skeletal hand on my cheek. Mom’s eyes piercing the haze, and I swear she wasn’t that old yesterday. “It’s okay, baby. You can let go. You can let go, Marco, it’s okay, I love you, sweetie, so much…”

Mumbling. Something something _medically induced coma._

Pain.

Needle stick.

Blackness.

* * *

I’ve been in a medically induced coma exactly once in my life,  when I was fourteen and drowning in my own lungs and literally everyone thought I was going to die. My friend Ymir sat on the end of my bed months later and asked me what it had felt like, being in a coma for a week.

And I told her the truth. It felt like nothing.

There had been pain and a needle in my arm one second, and then a second later I was waking up in the ICU with three different doctors in my face, not aware in the slightest that I’d been practically dead for a week. There was no passage of time, no strange limbo where I hovered for seven days and nights while my body struggled to put itself back together. One second. A blip in the continuum. And that’s how it is now.

Unconscious. One second. Conscious.

I wonder how long I’ve been out. Because that’s what this is. I’ve been in a medically induced coma.

Or at least, that’s what I think until my vision swims into focus and Jean’s sitting on the edge of my bed.

“Hi,” he says with a sad smile, fingers lacing through my hair.

“Holy shit, I’m dead,” I gape.

Jean shakes his head and hops up, stretching his legs - two actual _legs_ sticking out of his soccer shorts, not a real one and a prosthetic - and smirking down at me. “Not yet. At least technically. Your vitals are still going, but I mean, you’re here talking to me, so you’re pretty dead. Just not all the way dead. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere. I’m rusty.”

“God, please tell me I’m not imagining this.” My throat feels horrifically tight, something burning behind my eyes.

“I should hope not. Imagining your dead boyfriend coming to hold your hand into the afterlife. That’s clichéd as all hell, Marco, I’d be incredibly disappointed in you for using the last of your mental capacity to imagine--”

I get up, which is something I haven’t been capable of in over a month, suck in a deep breath, which is something I haven’t been capable of in ages, and shut him up with every kiss I’ve been wasting on the ends of cigarettes since he hasn’t been around to receive them. The human imagination is capable of tremendous things, but I want more than anything to believe that this is real because I had _forgotten_ , I had forgotten exactly how his lips felt against mine, how he had this stupid little smile that muffled itself against my mouth. I had forgotten but now I remember and he is so warm, he is so warm and I have been so cold for twelve long months.

“Well, someone got over the whole ‘dead’ shocker very quickly,” Jean laughs.

“Shut up,” I choke out, burying my face in the crook of his neck and trying for everything I’m worth not to break down sobbing. “Shut up. I love you. I love you, I love you, I missed you so much, you _asshole_ , I love you.”

“I love you too,” he hums, fingertips tracing nonsensical little patterns across my back. “Sorry if I pissed you off with the book.”

“You didn’t piss me off, I was sad and alone and I _missed you_ , and I… wait.” Frowning confusedly, I take a step back and look over at Jean, at our surroundings. My hospital room. My mom sleeping in a chair in the corner. Some horrible, skeletal, wasted thing that’s supposed to be me in the bed, hooked up to a million different tubes and machines. A sudden sick feeling hits me hard in the stomach.

“If it’s any consolation, you look much better now,” Jean says, running a thumb across the ridge of my cheekbones. “You look different without the cannula. I like it.”

I reach up to touch the other side of my face, the canvas of my own skin unfamiliar without the small bump of my oxygen line there. “So I’m actually dead. Almost dead.”

“Yup.”

“You’re actually here.”

“You didn’t just make out with a mirage, did you?”

Letting out a disbelieving, breathy little laugh, I lean against the nearest wall and run a hand through my hair. “So something really does happen after you die. I’ll be damned.”

“Things would be so much easier for you if you’d just accept that I’m right at least ninety percent of the time, Marco,” Jean sighs dramatically, planting a hand on the wall next to my head and leaning in until our noses brush. “Even supernovas have a next stage of existence. Black holes to new universes, nebulas that create whole new galaxies. Nothing just ends.”

And _that’s_ when I start crying, laughing and throwing my arms around his waist. “Dollar in the Metaphor Jar. Right now.”

“The dead have no currency!” he protests, laughing and crying just as hard as he holds me against him, a smile pressed to the side of my neck. “God, I missed you.”

“So what _does_ happen after you die?” I ask, looking back between my own failing body on the hospital bed and the even rise and fall of my mother’s breathing, deep asleep and completely unaware that her baby boy is about to slip away.

“I, uh… I don’t exactly know?” Jean laughs nervously, scratching at the back of his head. “I was sort of waiting around for you before I found out.”

“That’s disgustingly romantic.”

“You’ve been hanging out with Levi and it shows.”

“Maybe,” I laugh, leaning into him again, quietly marveling in the solidity of him because ghosts aren’t supposed to be able to hold you, aren’t supposed to be tangible beneath your seeking hands, breath warm on your skin and kisses lingering where they fall. I’d spent so long believing that happy endings are just stories that haven’t ended yet that I never gave any thought to the fact that the star-crossed tragedy of our generation could actually have something like closure, some last spark of happiness before the world went dark. Jean made me better. He never understood the extent, but he made me better, and I can already feel myself starting to light up again, starshine settling under my skin because he’s here to kindle it. I’d forgotten peace almost as much as I’d forgotten how it felt for him to love me. “So what’s your bet? Reincarnation, like you said that one time? A chance at true heroism? A thousand different lives fighting a thousand different monsters?”

Jean shrugs, smoothing my hair back from my face and grinning crookedly. “I’d be okay with fighting a thousand different monsters as long as I get to fight them with you.”

I step away from him for a moment, ignoring the loss of his warmth for the time it takes to walk over to where Mom is still sleeping. My sense of touch doesn’t quite work right, my hand fading in and out of visibility in the almost-touch of my palm against her cheek. She mumbles something in her sleep and turns over. The flatline will wake her up. I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry.

Swallowing hard, I walk back over to Jean, feeling an out-of-place smile tugging at my lips. “Okay. Let’s go do it.”

“Go do what?”

“Heroism. Fighting monsters. Jumping into the void and falling into eternal blackness. Whatever happens after you die,” I shrug, watching the light filtering under the doorway of my hospital room. “I just want to do it together.”

Sometimes when a supernova fades away, it leaves a black hole in its wake, massive and destructive as it sucks in everything around it. But scientists have a theory that black holes can lead to new parts of the universe if not new universes entirely. We must collapse before we can move on to something new.

Jean reaches over and grabs my hand, smiles as he brushes his lips across my knuckles. “Together. Okay?”

Grinning back, I reach out for the door and whatever lies beyond as the heart monitor lets out a dull, flat whine behind me. “Okay.”

 


End file.
